Columnist.
Kim Davis confounded the pollsters and propelled an underdog candidate, Matt Bevin, to victory in the Kentucky governor's race. Nearly two-thirds of voters in Ohio rejected marijuana. And citizens in Houston vetoed their city council and rejected a bad policy on sexual orientation and gender identity. Conventional wisdom is that social liberalism is an electoral winner, but that's not true. At least not in the swing states of Kentucky and Ohio, and not even in the liberal city of Houston. And definitely not [Tuesday] night.
On Tuesday, citizens of Houston, Texas, will go to the polls to vote on a controversial "sexual orientation and gender identity" (dubbed SOGI) measure. Rather than protecting equality before the law, the SOGI ordinance, euphemistically named the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), creates special legal protections based on "sexual orientation and gender identity." HERO, like all sexual orientation and gender identity laws, is bad public policy.
Does legalizing physician-assisted suicide lead to a *drop* in the suicide rate? As counterintuitive as it sounds, some advocates of assisted suicide have been making this argument. A new academic study, however, shows the reverse to be true: legalizing physician-assisted suicide increases the total number of people committing suicide.
Before a joint session of Congress this morning, Pope Francis delivered a rousing address calling upon Americans to live up to the highest of our nation's ideals. Pointing to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, Francis praised Americans for their commitments to "liberty," "liberty in plurality and non-exclusion," "social justice and the rights of persons," and "the capacity for dialogue and openness to God."
In recent days, many Americans have reveled in the hypocrisy of a number of well-known people revealed as subscribers to the Ashley Madison pro-adultery website. But there is a far more important revelation from the hackings: the alarming number who signed up for the site — 33 million people. That startling statistic reminds us that no one is immune to sexual temptation. It also shows how far modern society has drifted from the idea that marriage is a permanent and exclusive union. Some people may be inclined to blame the breakdown of marriage on gays and lesbians, but as the Ashley Madison hack should make clear, heterosexuals are to blame for the breakdown of marriage.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling redefining marriage throughout the country, there's an open question as to what happens to people who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife. [Monday] the Supreme Court declined to review a lower court's ruling requiring the county clerk of Rowan County, Ky., to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.
Why is the government in the marriage business? As I explain in "Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom," it's to encourage a man and a woman to unite as husband and wife to then be mother and father to any children their union produces. It's based on the anthropological truth that men and women are distinct and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction requires a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father.
